Ask HN: Looking for a simple note taking tool • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Looking for a simple note taking tool

#11

Post by creer » Mon, May 27, 2024, 7:47 PM UTC

Why this (fairly general) obsession to include search in specific note taking tools. Search should (obviously) include both the notes but other documents (calendar, saved research papers, email...)

So shouldn't this search be a separate package than the note-taking?

And then you include photos of business cards in the note taking function?!?!?! By this time aren't bound to leave very few candidates and then only monolithic ones kinda by definition?

Re: Ask HN: Looking for a simple note taking tool

#12

Post by nunodonato » Mon, May 27, 2024, 7:57 PM UTC

creer wrote: post #11

Why this (fairly general) obsession to include search in specific note taking tools. Search should (obviously) include both the notes but other documents (calendar, saved research papers, email...) So shouldn't this search be a separate package than the note-taking? And then you include photos of business cards in the note taking function?!?!?! By this time aren't bound to leave very few candidates and then only mono…

its knowledge storage. for me works wonderfully well :) I have lots of papers, cards, letters, brochures.. I just want to take a picture and be done with it, but being sure I can recall it later when I need to. Why would I want to use different apps if the use-case is the same? store and recall.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for a simple note taking tool

#13

Post by hnaccter » Mon, May 27, 2024, 8:33 PM UTC

Logseq can do most, if not all, of what you’re asking either natively or through the plugin infra it has.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for a simple note taking tool

#14

Post by vunderba » Mon, May 27, 2024, 8:35 PM UTC

The issue here is the automatic OCR for images. There's just not a lot of super good locally hosted solutions for this. Tesseract can be hit or miss depending on how lossy your images are.

AI and good OCR likely means you're gonna be paying for some kind of SaaS offering.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for a simple note taking tool

#15

Post by markus_zhang » Mon, May 27, 2024, 8:40 PM UTC

I think if there is a way to add tags to documents it would aid finding whatever you want. You might not need AI for that.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for a simple note taking tool

#16

Post by yokoprime » Mon, May 27, 2024, 9:45 PM UTC

I would recommend you look into Obsidian. It's literally made to be a second brain. There's some really good AI plugins, I use the "copilot" plugin which uses your own Open AI API key. You can sync using Syncthing, iCloud or pay for Obsidian Sync. For personal use Obsidian is free.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for a simple note taking tool

#17

Post by steven_noble » Mon, May 27, 2024, 10:37 PM UTC

Personally, I find it hard to beat Vim.

But if you are looking for a free and flexible GUI alternative, maybe give Joplin a go?

Re: Ask HN: Looking for a simple note taking tool

#18

Post by steven_noble » Mon, May 27, 2024, 10:37 PM UTC

steven_noble wrote: post #17

Personally, I find it hard to beat Vim. But if you are looking for a free and flexible GUI alternative, maybe give Joplin a go?

and/or Zotero

Re: Ask HN: Looking for a simple note taking tool

#19

Post by leed25d » Mon, May 27, 2024, 11:59 PM UTC

I like Joplin

Re: Ask HN: Looking for a simple note taking tool

#20

Post by muzani » Tue, May 28, 2024, 5:10 AM UTC

gtirloni wrote: post #8

You want an AI-powered "simple" note taking app for less than $10/month?

For comparison, ChatGPT provides full AI access to GPT-4, which they sell at $10/1M tokens. They charge $20 monthly for this, as do similar AI wrappers.

But an AI based text search is $0.02/1M tokens. For 1000x1000 images, GPT-4o charges $0.003825 per image.

I think what OP is asking for is perfectly financially reasonable these days.